On Being Sad and Mistaken

Mood Effects on the Accuracy of Thin-Slice Judgments

Ambady, Nalini
Gray, Heather M.

¹Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

²Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nalini Ambady, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. E-mail: [email protected].

Portions of this work were presented at the second annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, Texas, February 2002. This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering Grant BCS-9733706 and by the Fetzer Institute. Thanks go to Marie Alfaro, Elizabeth Johnson, Ashli Owen-Smith, and Thai Nguyen for assistance.

Received Date: April 4, 2001; Revised Date: March 27, 2002; Accepted Date: March 28, 2002

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83(4):p 947-961, October 2002.

A series of studies explored how sadness impacts the accuracy of social judgments. In Study 1, induced sadness led to reduced accuracy in judgments of teacher effectiveness from brief samples of nonverbal behavior (thin slices). In Study 2, sad participants showed reduced accuracy in judging relationship type from thin slices as well as diminished judgmental efficiency. Study 3 revealed that higher Beck Depression Inventory scores were associated with diminished accuracy on the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity. Finally, Study 4 tested the possibility that sadness impairs accuracy by promoting a more deliberative information-processing style. As expected, accuracy was higher among participants in a sad mood condition who completed the judgment task while simultaneously performing a distracting cognitive load task.